Inauthentic Voice Undermines Your Narrative

It's the 17th of September in 2025. A right wing organizer and talking head was gunned down onstage. In the chaos, the shooter seemed to have gotten away. He was eventually brought into custody, and details emerge about this 22-year-old from a conservative background in Mormon country. And, in an attempt to solidify their case, the government presents a record of a supposed conversation had between this shooter, and their roommate who they may or may not have been in a relationship with.

This man grew up in the digital age, was a part of various online cultures, and marked the brass of his ammunition with memes and references. Yet when investigators released a transcript of what he supposedly said to his roommate, it reads like a combination between a Civil War-era love letter from the front, and a second-draft attempt by a middle-aged man who has no friends under the age of 40, and who doesn't have kids, so he has no goddamn clue how the young people talk these days.

In other words, it's about as convincing as the Steve Buscemi, "How do you do fellow kids?" meme.

You know the one.

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Make Sure Your Story SOUNDS Right To The Ear

How your characters talk is a complicated combination of tone, slang, time period, ethnicity, cultural background, and a thousand other things. And it's a lot like eating a carefully-crafted lasagna; when it comes together, all the disparate pieces form a singular whole. And sometimes when you have just one or two little elements off, it might be written off as a quirk, or a chef's decision. But when something is really off, it ruins the entire ensemble.

One of the easiest ones to screw up is when you have someone who is part of a certain demographic, but they sound like they're part of another one. For instance, a rebellious 20-something with contempt for his father might sneeringly refer to him as "my old man" in the 1970s, or even the 1980s... but not in 2025. If a character is supposed to be British, then it's likely they're going to give measurements in the metric system, or use Celsius for temperature, unless they're acclimated to doing things differently for some reason. Someone who was raised on Chicago's South Side will have a different local dialect than someone from Boston's south side... as well as completely different understandings of cuisine, culture, and everything in between.

You can always tell when something sounds off.

Speech is the manner we use to communicate, but beyond that, it's a road map of who we are, where we're from, and what experiences and interests we have. If you've ever heard veterans talk, then you know they have their own lingo and jargon, and it can offer some real insight as to who they were during their time in the service. If someone is terminally online, they'll have particular ways of speaking that might not making sense to people who aren't... and even if it doesn't crowd into their speech, they'll understand it when they see or hear it somewhere else. You can often tell if someone has been to therapy by the way they talk about issues, or if they read a lot of books without talking to too many people by how they mispronounce words they've only read before.

Writers often develop characters who have similar experiences to themselves, not just for ease of slipping into their skin, but for making sure their voice sounds authentic. But the further you're going to stretch outside of what you know personally, or places you've been and people you've heard, the more research you're going to have to do if you want to avoid the literary equivalent of your characters sounding like parents trying to be hip by drastically misusing their kids' slang in front of their friends.

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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Using Real World Slang and Swearing In Your Fantastical Story (Dos and Don'ts)

This week I want to talk about a very particular trend that seems to be cropping up in a lot of books. It is, simply put, the tendency that a lot of writers seem to have of letting modern colloquial slang and swear words just drop out of the mouths of characters in settings where that kind of language simply doesn't make sense. Whether you're out on the rim of a far-off asteroid belt, or riding shaggy aurochs across the frozen tundra of Marvosa, the words your characters use shape the story... and if you end up having them sound like someone from small town America somewhere in the mid 20-teens, that's going to shatter readers' immersion.

"Yeet!" Scarbrand roared, hurling the great spear toward the charging frost giant...

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Why You Shouldn't Do This

There are a lot of books that have done this in recent years. Fourth Wing, Quicksilver, and A Court of Thorns and Roses to name a few. However, each of these acts as a good example of why using modern language in a non-modern story without thinking is a problem... because it undermines your world building, and it takes your readers out of the story.

Now, for clarity, I'm not talking about digging deep into the cultural origin of words here. If you're writing a story about a war on the other side of the galaxy between alien factions, and one of them has a heavily-armored vehicle with a large main gun and additional support weapons, you can still call it a tank. The fact that it's completely divorced from the weapon development during the first World War on Earth when the British tried to hide the development of these armored vehicles by claiming they were new kinds of water tanks (hence the name) isn't the sort of thing that's going to take readers out of the story for the most part.

Yeah, this one you can get away with.

No, for this case what I'm talking about is using modern slang, or truly modern phrases, but letting them come out of the mouths of characters who have no business talking like this. As an example, if you have a high fantasy story about dragon riders, and one of them wants to compliment the other on a great feat of riding, or bravery in battle, they wouldn't clap them on the shoulder and say something like, "Based maneuver, comrade," or, "Poggers flying! You're lucky Skyrake didn't yeet you off."

If that example got a laugh out of you, good. However, the point remains that the way people talk, and the words they use, are a part of the underlying nature of the world your story takes place in. So if you're going to have particular phrases in your world, or particular pieces of slang, it's worth asking why they exist, and if they make sense given the culture of the world you've set up.

Just like how an urukhai declaring, "Looks like meat's back on the menu, boys!" means that there are restaurants in Mordor, and that these magically-grown murder monsters understand the concept of a menu in the first place, you can sometimes get away with one or two instances... but not if you're using it every, single conversation.

When You Can Get Away With It

As with every rule, there are always going to be exceptions. The first one, which might be a slightly controversial take, is that you can get away with these words if there is some kind of explanation that makes sense in-world. If you're writing a historical fantasy, for instance, you might come into contact with The Tiffany Problem, which is when we don't realize how far back into our history certain ideas, concepts, or even names can go. The other side of this coin is when you have stories set in the far future, but there are still bits of our colloquial language that have survived the test of time, even if the exact origin and meaning has been lost by those who've adopted particular turns of phrase.

More on the Tiffany Problem in the video below, if you haven't seen it yet.

The second time when you can more or less get away with modern parlance is when it's a word that conveys a particular feeling, but you don't want to make up something unique to this setting. As a for-instance, lots of fantasy novels will have made-up swear words in them ("bags" was a common one in the fantasy novels by Terry Goodkind, for instance), but it's quite common for grittier or more hard-edged books like the Witcher series, or the First Law series, to just use modern swear words. Shit, fuck, damn, and so on are all perfectly serviceable, and they've existed in some way for hundreds, if not thousands of years. So even if these aren't the specific swear words we're hearing (if you subscribe to the idea that fantasy stories are written in the native language of that world, and we are seeing a translated version of the tale), the meaning is more important than the specific word in this context. And sometimes made-up swear words just don't convey the right feeling.

The third situation where you can get away with this, and where it might even be the whole point of the story you're writing, is when it is done for comedic effect. This is particularly true when we stray into the realm of parody. For example, perhaps you want to have a traditional high fantasy story, but all the characters talk like they're in a high school teen drama from the 1990s. Maybe you want to write a cyberpunk novel set in an alternate year 2020, but while the technology is all vastly different, the subcultures and slang are largely the same, which is kind of a hilarious juxtaposition. Perhaps you want the aliens to talk in an ancient Earth dialect because that was the most recent trasmission they received, so they all sound and act like they're from the 1950s, even though the book is set much further along in the future than that.

This is perhaps the most important thing to remember... the juxtaposition of something familiar from our world with a fantastical setting is inherently funny in a lot of ways. So if you're doing this for comedy, it's going to go over pretty well. But if you want people to take these characters seriously, the way they're talking is going to be a pretty big issue to look past, even if the rest of the story is meant to be poe-faced... and honestly, that might just make it funnier.

As an example, check out my mystery-solving noir cat novels Marked Territory and Painted Cats. They're inherently ridiculous... which is part of what makes their very serious tone just add to the joke!

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Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

The Purpose of Storytelling is Communication (If You Aren't Doing That, Fix It)

When we write a story, whether it's a piece of short fiction or a massive doorstop of a novel, we often get wrapped up in what we were trying to do as the storyteller. Whether it's the lovingly crafted purple prose, the intricate plot twists and reveals, or the unique patois we used for how we chose to write it, these are usually very specific decisions we make as creators for how we want to present our stories.

The problem comes when the people you're writing those stories for aren't picking up what you're laying down. Because when that happens, you need to do something to make sure that what you're saying is what your audience is actually hearing.

Hmmm... is "apocrypha" a well-known enough word to use here?

Before we get into it this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron! To be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

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Listening Is Just As Important As Speaking

To get the obvious out of the way, there are different dialects in any language. There are different styles of prose, and there are different expectations that come with different genres. This post is not saying that we must always use Proper English (TM) and write in the same, easily-digested style or we are Writing Wrong (TM). Sometimes you want to speak to a particular audience, or you feel that the language you're using is part of the artistry of your story, and to change it would be to lose something the book needs.

All of that is down to artistic decision. This is your book, and you are the one with the final say in how it's presented to the public.

With that said, though...

With that said, if your audience cannot understand what you are saying, then it's up to you as the creator to say it in a way so your story isn't lost on people trying to read your book.

Communication is a two-way street, and you could be telling the most amazing story your audience has ever heard... but if you're telling it in French, than anyone who doesn't speak that language isn't going to be able to access that story. The same is true if you publish something exclusively in Braille, or if it's only written in cursive, or Cyrillic. For a communication cycle to be complete, the message you're delivering has to be translated, and understood by the intended recipient. And for most of us that's the widest audience possible so that we can sell enough books to pay the bills.

It is an almost universal experience to work really hard on a story, or a book, and when you hand it to your beta readers to have someone scratch their head going, "I don't get it," or, "what the hell do all these $5 words mean?" Sometimes it's because a given beta reader isn't familiar with the language of a particular genre (such as someone who doesn't normally read cosmic horror trying to figure out what eldritch and squamous mean without looking them up), or it might be because the way you write isn't intuitive to the general public. But there's always a knee-jerk reaction to place the blame on the audience; to say that you did everything right, but they're just not listening correctly.

The truth of the matter is, we need the audience for our stories to spread. So while it is important to keep the soul of the story in mind, and to be careful when it comes to changing the way you use language, it's also important to keep the practical aspect of, "Can they understand what I'm saying?" firmly in mind. Because at the end of the day, writers need an audience, and it is our job to provide entertainment for them. Because there are already hundreds of stories out there they can read instead... so make understanding yours as easy on them as you can.

Even if that means we have to use plainer language to meet our audience where they're at.

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Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

You Can't Change History Without Changing Your Language (A Modern Fantasy Pitfall)

Most modern fantasy stories that you come across use the hidden world trope. From Vampire: The Masquerade to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, the fantastical world was always here, but it was kept secret from your prying eyes. This allows us to show the audience a world they know, and then to bring them past the veil and into the realm of the supernatural. Part of the reason we see this trope so often is that it's what readers really expect to see... but another reason is that modern fantasy without a hidden world requires so much retooling and redesigning that it can get exhausting.

And in some cases, it no longer resembles the world we know at all. This goes all the way down to the language we use, and the pop culture references that can be made in our stories without snapping the reader out of the narrative.

And things can get conspiracy-board complicated with this.

Before we get into it this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron! To be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

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When You Alter History, Everything Changes

We're all familiar with the idea of the Butterfly Effect. Often used as a science fiction premise, it's when someone goes back in time, changes one thing, and then they come back to their present only to find that seemingly tiny action has resulted in massive, unanticipated changes in the present.

This is something you have to do when you remove the secret world trope from a modern fantasy story. It's also why so many stories that you see have a major supernatural event set relatively close to the present. Whether it's the revelation of the supernatural world in Trueblood, or the world-shaping alterations that occur in Shadowrun, most of the world's history played out the same way it did in our history books, with a divergent point happening somewhere in the modern era (typically in the 1980s or 1990s, though sometimes later).

But when you go back further than that, you have to change more. And you don't just have to change major world events (such as the necessity for adding necromancy to the Geneva convention if there were Nazi sorcerers raising corpses in the trenches to continue the fighting), but you also need to change the language people do and don't use.

For fantastic examples of this, check out Lindsay Ellis's video Bright: The Apotheosis of Lazy Worldbuilding.

While there are a lot of points made in that video (and you should go watch it) the one I want to hit on is a point that a lot of writers often overlook; if you change history, then you change the culture. You alter the course of events, and that should lead language to develop in different ways, or for particular touchstones to operate differently.

One of the smallest, but most deeply-rooted, examples is when Will Smith's cop character tells his neighbor, "Just crip walk your ass back over to the barbecue."

This statement, especially said by a cop, is a direct reference to the Crips, an infamous street gang. However, for this statement to make sense in-universe that means you needed to have the trans-Atlantic slave trade, leading to the Civil War in America, leading to the exodus of freed slaves from the harsh conditions of the south, leading to the building tide of social concerns that created the Black Panthers, you need the Black Panthers to be destroyed by government actions, and for the Crips to be created to fill that power vacuum. And you need all of that to happen in a world where, apparently, 2,000 years ago the 9 armies of all the various races (elves, humans, and other fantasy creatures) came together to defeat some unspecific Dark Lord.

That's stretching it, to say the least.

Now, that's not the only example we can take from Bright, whose world has fantasy creatures and magic going back even more than the 2,000 years mentioned (unless that was when all fantasy arrived on Earth's doorstep, though the film doesn't say, so we can't assume that). There's the moment Smith says, "Fairy lives don't matter today," which implies the existence of the Black Lives Matter movement, and all the historical precedent that goes into that, including the existence of all of our real-world human racism, which seems weird in a world with half a dozen other fantasy creatures added into the mix for millennia. There's also a moment where Smith yells at an orc, "So take your Shrek-looking ass back to Fiona!" This, of course, implies that somehow Grimm's fairy tales were still written in this world, that the Disney company exists, and that the specific events that led to the creation of Dreamworks still happened, and that they made Shrek in this setting, and that it still became a massive, box office hit.

Which is asking a lot from your audience in terms of believability.

You Can Do It... But Think It Through

I don't want anyone reading through all of that and thinking that it's just not worth the effort of writing modern fantasy without a masquerade, or a relatively recent divergence point. Or that's it's not even worth writing modern fantasy at all, if you have to police every reference your characters make, song they quote, or turn of phrase they use. All of that, though, is part of doing your due diligence when it comes to keeping your setting internally consistent, and minimizing the amount of times your audience asks you questions that your story isn't going to answer.

You're the one who decides your own workload.

With all of that said, though, if it sounds like too much effort to alter the real world with an older divergence point, then it might be worth taking the dramatic step of building your own modern fantasy setting; one that isn't on Earth at all. Especially because this can let you make echoing references, where you have something that is in-context of the setting you've made, but which feels like a reflection of a similar piece of media, turn of phrase, etc., from our real world. For example, replacing the phrase, "Don't take any wooden nickels," with, "Don't take any brass tacks," could refer, in-world, to a name for a coin that's no longer in distribution (a brass tack) from a country your nation was once at war with, and so their currency wasn't accepted (or was considered a sign that you're a sympathizer for their cause) long enough that this became part of the lexicon. Alternatively, if the coins are outdated and no longer in circulation, they might be only used by criminal elements, making them a crime to hold, even if they're valuable in a certain part of society. This would also allow the phrase, "Let's get down to brass tacks," to also be co-opted, as you're discussing a serious, sensitive matter that is not to leave this room.

Just as an example.

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For folks who just want to do their part to help keep me making more content, please subscribe/follow me in these locations:

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Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!